Anna is the kind of girl people look straight through. At school, on the bus, at home - she exists quietly in the background, where asking for anything comes with a price she learned long ago to stop paying. Even with her best friend, Alice, she never fully steps into the world. She just survives it, carefully and without being noticed. Her life was supposed to stay bland, colourless, manageable. Nothing was supposed to change that. Then she runs into Sophie. And something shifts - not all at once, and not enough to understand, but just enough that it doesn't stop. Anna finds herself pulled toward something she can't name, something her body recognises before her mind can catch up. And the worst part is, she doesn't want it to stop.

Prompt #109 A professor realises a student's mystery stories mirror real missing persons cases in town and the newest one points to them. ****** A record-breaking winter shuts down Massachusetts. Classes move online. Roads ice over. And people begin to disappear. Emma Remington studies narrative ethics at an elite college where crime is discussed as theory. Her professor encourages all students to be creative. Emma delivers until her writing starts aligning too closely with real events unfolding beyond campus. What begins as an academic exercise becomes something else entirely. As missing persons cases multiply and the storm isolates the town, Emma is forced to confront a question she's spent her life avoiding: when does observation become complicity? And what happens when the wrong person is paying attention?